March19, 2009

Washington, DC – Today the Oversight and
Investigations Subcommittee of the House Armed Services
Committee heard testimony regarding the recent report from
The Project on National Security Reform.

“It is evident that a lot of thought went into
the Project on National Security Reform, unfortunately it
doesn’t answer some of the questions we hoped it
would,” commented Subcommittee Chairman Vic Snyder
(D-AR). “Most importantly, it does not address
the question of how to enable the government, amidst the
distractions of urgent but transitory crises, to think and
plan more strategically.”

Snyder continued, “In addition, it shows a
certain naiveté in proposing that all of its
recommendations, across the whole of the Executive Branch and
the Congress, must be implemented in their entirety in order
to improve government operations. I believe that we can
actually move forward, perhaps incrementally, with both big
and small steps to improve interagency operations and the
strategic agility of the government.”

“Since the dawn of the 21st century, the
United States has faced an ever shifting, complex
international environment. Ideally, we would have an
agile national security structure able to respond to the
challenges as needed, but we do not,” Subcommittee
Ranking Member Rob Wittman (R-VA) said.
“The Project on National Security Reform has reviewed
the interagency coordination problem in a thoughtful, logical
manner that makes a series of recommendations for the
organization of both the national security apparatus and the
Congress. While we cannot single handedly make these
changes, we do have a responsibility to start the
dialogue.”

The House Armed Services Committee has a long standing
interest in interagency issues, and the Oversight and
Investigations subcommittee held several hearings on this
subject. Congress required an independent review of the
overall national security system in the FY2008 National
Defense Authorization Act, and the Project on National
Security Reform conducted the study, releasing its 700-page
report last December.

The report focuses on how the National Security
Council, Congress, and the Departments and agencies contend
with national security issues, concluding there is
currently no structure at the interagency level that
ensures integration of all of the tools of national power.
The report puts forth numerous recommendations for how to
solve this problem.